Interview with Brent Oxley - CEO of Hostgator.com
We had the chance to sit down with Brent Oxley , CEO of Hostgator.com to ask him a few questions we’re sure a lot of you have. For those of you stuck under an internet rock Hostgator is one of the biggest Hosting companies on the web today. They have grown at an extreme rate and here are some of the reasons why. Hear it straight from Brent himself .
Gasmoney: Can you tell us about yourself and how you got started with HostGator.com?
BRENT OXLEY: I launched Hostgator about five years ago from my college dorm room with $1,000. I was enrolled at Florida Atlantic University at the time and was working on a business degree. It wasn’t long before I was walking in and out of class every other minute to take a sales call. After completing my first year of school I made the decision to drop out and focus fully on the gator. I only had a hundred customers at this point and really wasn’t making that much money. My family and friends pleaded with me that I was making a horrible mistake and that I needed to stay in school. I ignored them and have never looked back.
Telling you about me is really just telling you about Hostgator. I’m 24 years old and doing everything I can to grow the business with the help of very dedicated employees.
Gasmoney: Tell us about your company and services you offer?
BRENT OXLEY: Hostgator is one of the world’s largest hosting companies with over 130 employees and 700,000+ hosted domains. We moved our headquarters to Houston Texas a little over a year ago from Boca Raton Florida. The main reason we moved was to be able to find the employees needed to fuel our growth.
We currently offer shared, reseller, and dedicated hosting. We will be launching Windows hosting any day now.
Gasmoney: Can you tell us about your reseller program?
BRENT OXLEY: Our reseller hosting is much different then the traditional reseller program most people are familiar with. A Hostgator reseller plan allows anyone to become their very own hosting company. It’s all private labeled allowing you to create your very own plans and prices. For $24.95 a month you will have the ability to sell unlimited web sites with the only limit being on the amount of disk space and bandwidth included with the plan.
Gasmoney: What do you think has contributed to your company’s quick growth?
BRENT OXLEY: The biggest growth factor by far has been word of mouth from happy customers. In order to have happy customers you have to provide 24/7/365 superior support. Any company can spend a fortune to signup thousands of customers but without quality service and support they aren’t going to stay long.
Gasmoney: What is your day to day role like as the CEO of HostGator?
BRENT OXLEY: I spend most of my time helping customers. It’s advertised on our site that I’m personally available to help any customer that may need a little extra tlc. I also spend time advertising, managing employees, site updates, promotions, monitoring servers, paying bills, and even picking up trash around the office. I’m currently too involved with everything going on and am working to delegate some of my duties to other employees.
Gasmoney: Who do you see as your major competitors?
BRENT OXLEY: You have the usual candidates dreamhost, bluehost, lunarpages, etc… But really our biggest competitors are all the one man shows. It’s hard to compete with the one on
one service a small hosting company provides. You usually don’t have as reliable of a service, but it is a comforting feeling when your host knows you personally.
Gasmoney: What do you feel is the best thing about HostGator?
BRENT OXLEY: I would say it’s our honesty. It doesn’t matter how perfect we are or how amazing are support is. Like any company we screw up all the time. The difference is that when we make a mistake we are honest about it and take full responsibility.
Gasmoney: From a scale of 1 to 10, what do you rate your customer service and why?
BRENT OXLEY: I would rate us a 9 compared to most of the competition, but on a scale 1 to 10 with ten being perfect without any room to improve we would be closer to a six. We get the job done but there is plenty of room to go above and beyond. That’s what a customer expects.
Gasmoney: What do you think can be improved about your company?
BRENT OXLEY: The biggest problem we have is the billing system we are currently using. We are in the process of building a system that will free up thousands of man hours a year. We are currently wasting this time on jobs that should be automated and sitting around waiting for the system to load. This time can be used to provide a higher level of support to our customers.
Gasmoney: What can the world expect from HostGator in 2008?
BRENT OXLEY: Hostgator will launch another hosting brand under the name launchpad.com. We will become a domain registrar and will be selling domains at a very competitive rate. We will be testing out advertising on TV commercials.HostGator will become a major player in the Windows hosting market. Our VOIP company will be launched under the name voipo.com As you can see we have a lot of plans for 2008. It’s going to be a very exciting year for us!
That concludes the interview and we want to give a special thank you to Brent and the Hostgator Team for all the hard work they’ve done over the years. We appreciate you giving the time to talk with us and we wish you more success.
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